The newsroom at New Delhi Television (NDTV), pictured in 2003.
Photograph: Gautam Singh/AP

Late in September, the newsroom at India Today, a 24-hour news channel based just outside New Delhi, was briefly transformed.

A diorama of the Indian subcontinent filled the centre of the studio; toy models of Indian and Pakistan soldiers were carefully placed over an area labelled Kashmir. TV anchors, one wearing a tactical vest, stood over the board holding croupier’s sticks, ready to plot manoeuvres. A graphic that appeared at top of screen as the scene was broadcast read: “Live: India Today War Room.”

Less hammy, but also raising disquiet, was a recent decision by NDTV, one of the country’s most credible news networks, to drop a taped interview with a senior leader of the Congress party, in which he criticised government preening over recent “surgical strikes” India says it launched against militants in Kashmir.

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According to a leaked email, NDTV’s editorial director Sonia Singh explained the interview “risk[s] security for political advantage”. “Our army cannot be doubted or questioned or used for political gains,” she wrote to the channel’s journalists.

Unlike in 1999 (the last time India and Pakistan went to war), this most recent ramping up of tensions between the two is being beamed into Indian homes on dozens of 24-hour news channels, most barely a decade old.

On other stories, the prevailing TV style is blasting and breathless (there is Breaking News, Big Breaking News and Code Red Breaking News). But the eagerness of many networks in the past weeks to assume a war posture has sparked soul-searching among some Indian journalists over the direction of the country’s fast-growing, but still relatively young TV market.

“Journalists have come to see themselves as warriors,” says Shekhar Gupta, an editor, columnist and former vice-president of the India Today Group.

The man often credited with bringing what has been dubbed the Fox News style to India is Arnab Goswami, an spectacled Oxford graduate whose debate programme, The Newshour, is often lampooned, but easily commands the country’s largest English-speaking audience.

Goswami started a recent show declaring: “Pakistan will not learn a lesson until we hammer them into submission”, pushing the hashtag, #ActAgainstPak. Jha says the 43-year-old – who this week was granted government bodyguards after threats from terror groups – is part of a wider group of TV anchors who favour full-throated opinions over news.

“Reporting and opinion has become completely blurred,” he says. “The idea of a news story on TV has almost disappeared and been replaced with studio discussions, where they often take a line even more hawkish than the government’s.”

A studio discussion of an issue such as Kashmir, versus an on-the-ground report, doesn’t just rate better, it’s cheaper too. “Most of the channels are not doing well financially,” Jha says. “There are very few that make money in India.”

Some of those that do, particularly in Punjab and the southern states, are owned by politicians or businesspeople and serve as extensions of their empire, according to watchdog groups.

N. Bhaskara Rao, a media analyst, blames the bombast on the pressure to fill 24 hours’ airtime in a crowded market. “Maybe it works in the UK and USA, but in India, it can’t be sustained,” he says. “So you manufacture, you hype, you shout, dramatise and you repeat.”

According to analysis produced for the Guardian by CMS Media Labs, among four Hindi news channels, coverage of the Indian army’s reported strikes on Pakistan-controlled Kashmir took up between 49% and 70% of primetime air between 29 September and 1 October.

Gupta, a former editor of the Indian Express newspaper, sees in the media’s march to war something of the state of political discourse in India: shriller and more partisan than in the past.

“Today the media is divided in two: the dominant section, which wants to go to war every minute, and makes big claims on behalf of the government or the armed forces, which embarrasses professional soldiers,” he says.

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“On the other hand are those who don’t like the government, don’t like [prime minister Narendra] Modi, and who instinctively won’t believe anything they say.”

Social media, enormously popular in India, but as combative there as anywhere else, has also reduced the room for nuance. “These days it’s much easier to be black or white,” Gupta says.

Still, if you leave TV to one side, there might be cause for optimism, Jha says. “If you step back and consider the whole of the Indian media, you’ll see there are different transitions going on,” he says.

Digital news outlets are proliferating – though still struggling to make money – and counter-narratives to those pushed by the TV networks are readily accessible to anyone with a smart phone.

“The media is now larger, more diverse, more plural, and more connected to the reader, which makes it more accountable,” he says.

Gupta adds that the basic rules are still unchanged. Credibility matters, and is won carefully, and over time. “It’s like a game of test cricket,” he says. “It’s not a T20 match.”